Tag: geomapping

Tag: geomapping

I’ve sometimes wondered how I would respond if asked to name one innovation I would bring to a course I teach. What would it be, and what would it accomplish? Would it solve a problem, serve as an experiment, increase student engagement? What would motivate me to pursue my innovation? How would my students respond to it?

These are some of the questions I have been asking my colleagues and now have a chance to extend to all faculty at The University of Alabama. The reason is because I am now leading an Innovation Team effort. For me, it’s an extraordinary opportunity to work with faculty from across UA who want to make their online courses more engaging, more student-centered, more technologically current, more fresh and inspiring.

Dean Edelbrock has charged our newly-formed Innovation Team with bringing innovation to online degree programs at every level—from promotion of specific courses and the degree programs to which they pertain, to better engagement of students within those courses and programs, to fostering broad academic communities that endure outside the online classroom, and to improving retention and engaging alumni.

Who we are

So let me start by telling you who I am and what I hope to share with you in this blog and through our Innovation Team efforts as we work to support your hopes and needs for innovation work in online education. I come to the team with an academic background in the humanities (music history and medieval studies), and with experience teaching and cultivating academic communities both online and in the classroom. My Ph.D. work at New York University was cross-disciplinary and data-driven, and has contributed to my strong interest both in technologies for teaching and in metadata applications for research. My Innovation Team colleague Andrew Richardson brings to the table an academic background in higher education administration and communication, as well as experience in computer programming, marketing, media production, and many other technical skills. Together, we are excited by the daily opportunity to brainstorm ideas and develop implementations for online teaching and learning.

Starting in the Sandbox

I want to share with you some of the things we are working on – so that you have an idea of the kinds of materials we hope to make available for experimentation, along with our time and support. At the moment, Andrew and I are focusing on concepts and materials we believe could be applied broadly to various subject areas and student groups. We recently came across a set of geo-mapping tools in Leaflet and Mapbox, and found these to have interesting capabilities not only as presentation items or learning objects, but also as components of interactive assignments or group projects. We are preparing to pilot community-building tools like Slack and GroupMe because we see how these could enable both individual faculty and entire degree programs to nurture virtual academic communities that persist beyond the online classroom. These and other tools will be featured in the Innovation Sandbox, an ever-growing repository that we hope will both inspire you and invite further conversation.

Hearing from You

Most importantly, we want to hear from you! We think of ourselves as your Innovation Team, which is to say we look forward to working with any and all who would like to explore with us the potentials of technology in the online classroom.